I think I get what you mean. I was trying to avoid orientalizing because there are white Buddhist teachers across the globe who really know their stuff. It's not a matter of "Asian teacher good" or "Asian religion good". There are plenty of Vietnamese monks who were born into the religion who smoke and ride motorcycles and buy the latest iPhones. It happens everywhere. But institutionally, because there has been more community and monetary support for Buddhist temples, you get more of the philosophy and less of the 'meditation-as-productivity-tool' stuff in non-Western countries.

Westerners just primarily get exposed through very watered down versions of the philosophy from people like Alan Watts and other spiritual hippie types who traveled to India decades ago. And before that, people like the British colonists who threw out any idea they couldn't recontextualize into a Christian framework. Or modern tech grifters selling their meditation apps.

There's lots of cool teachings and stories you can interpret literally or metaphorically depending on the situation. Like Manjushri cutting open the Himalayan valleys with a giant flaming sword, the consumption of human ashes as an intentional taboo to shock the mind out of a dualistic concept of reality, Chinese monks burning the books of other monks and essentially telling them to

. There's thousands of years of cosmology that blends with different cultures. And equally as much philosophical work as all of the European philosophers combined.

But with that also comes stuff like the Gelug school burning down other Tibetan monasteries, abuses of power in the sangha, etc. Some more humerous stuff like Buddhists debating Daoists, winning, then writing a follow up called "Laughing at the Dao". Just regular infighting, violence, and things that plague every other religion.

So its good not to have a romanticized view of Buddhism or any other religion. I personally vibe it much more than anything that relies on a creator god, but as this thread discusses, governance based on religious principles doesn't usually go so well.

I don't know the historic background, but I would totally believe this. I learned a little bit of spoken Tibetan while I was there, but the romanized words are not pronounced at all like they're spelled and pronunciation is difficult in general. It wasn't necessarily the language itself though, it was more that you have a break in concentration where someone is speaking Tibetan for 2 minutes while you stare at them, then you listen to the translator for 2 minutes and try to write things down, then it's back to not understanding for another 2 minutes, etc. I imagine it's a lot more effective when you speak the language. But 2 hours of that a day was really not fun. Still learned a lot though.

The Maoist uprising only occurred within the last 20 years, starting around 1996 and the monarchy was abolished in 2006. There were a lot of concessions made for this to happen and restrictions put on the most militant Maoists to re-integrate them into society and work with them through political processes instead of further violence. They've been ruled by a Democratic coalition government for a while that includes a few different communist groups. But they aren't a wholly socialist country and there's still elements of monarchism and things like that.

Well, I edited my comment to say the experience also turned me vegan. Since the primary goal is the reduction and elimination of suffering, it only stands to reason this includes animal suffering. I don't consider myself a Secular Buddhist in that I don't try to mold the religious teachings I've received into a secular framework (and I do not like Stephen Bachelor), but I just go along with some things while not personally believing they are true. Rebirth being the biggest thing, where a lot of Buddhist philosophy falls apart if you remove cosmological components like that, since many things follow from that assumption. But I'm not personally sold.

Buddhists tells a lot of stories about how significantly advanced practitioners can influence their own rebirths by building the mental fortitude (through years/lifetimes of meditation practice) to withstand and navigate the hellish and chaotic experience of their mindstream being ripped from their body at death and scattered/pulled in many different directions to their new life. It's silly to tell, but essentially, someone told me that my cat could be an enlightened being who is here to teach me patience and compassion for other beings. Do I literally believe that? No. But the idea did make me try to temper some of my impatience with their more destructive behaviors and open my mind to being more compassionate toward other animals in general.

Wikipedia no doubt has a simplified explanation, but in Madhyamaka philosophy, there's the idea of the "two truths" which is something we delved very heavily into. I don't know that it has really changed how I interact with the world as much as the former thing though.

I don't honestly know, it's not something I tried and it's not something anyone I know actually did. It is something that is mentioned in texts though. It's supposed to be a very advanced practice if you do it at all, so not something for newcomers. Primarily for the reason I mentioned of how it can really mess you up if you just go and do it on a whim.

Lol, no. I just mentioned it to point out that even the other Tibetan schools don't really have much to do with the Dalai Lama. His picture isn't hung up anywhere.

I used to think that if I ever wanted to leave everything behind, I'd go be a monk somewhere. But then I started falling asleep during lectures because they were being live translated from Tibetan into English and it's hard to concentrate when someone is speaking a language you don't know but you have to listen to them respectfully like you have a clue what it is they're saying.

The biggest lesson I learned was the value of community and I sort of understood why people congregate to churches and things. Everyone around me had the same baseline assumptions of what they should be doing to better themselves and to support each other, so it felt really significant to progress along that path together. These were people that traveled from all over the world to come to this spot to learn from authentic teachers, so they were also much more genuine than the meditation bros you'll find many places in the West. I hope to find that same community of socialists irl when I am in a position to do so.

If it were possible, I'd fly every Western Buddhist somewhere like that so they can experience the culture shock between their perception of commodified versions of Buddhism presented here and how much logic and philosophy is actually involved. It isn't just good vibes and sitting on a meditation cushion. There's mountains of texts written about epistemology, ethics, logic, etc. And it's not static, there's been many advancements in thought over the last decade. Such as how we now know that both Mahayana and 'Theravadin' (they weren't called that back then) Buddhists existed in the same monasteries in the past and no longer think that Mahayana was a later development, but competing schools of thought that developed in conversation with each other.

There's not really too many 'secret teachings' or anything. Even the things that are supposed to be 'secret' are really just things you're supposed to be trained by a teacher on first so that you do them properly. It's not a gatekeeping thing, but a "hey maybe you shouldn't meditate in front of corpses to contemplate death without first appropriately contextualizing this action and mentally preparing yourself so that you don't develop mental health issues" thing.

EDIT: Oh, yeah, that time also turned me vegan. The monastery only served vegan food. Meat has been big in Tibetan culture for a long time, but even long-dead masters had problems with it and monasteries forbidding meat is becoming more and more widespread. There's lots of texts about animal rights and their place in Buddhist ethics as well.

He's unfortunately the public face of Buddhism to the common person in the West, but I always have to go out of my way to emphasize how he's really just a drop in the ocean. He's not even the spiritual head of his own school, just the political figurehead for the exile government.

I studied at a Kagyu-Nyingma monastery and he never gets mentioned at all. His relevance to the average Buddhist who isn't Tibetan is really quite low, and even many Tibetan practitioners don't think of him as an authority, but just another teacher they may or may not be familiar with.

Someone practicing Zen or Chan or Pure Land, or anything else outside of that sphere doesn't regard him at all except on an individual level.

Edit: I know he tries to sell Buddhism to the average Westerner who is influenced by Facebook posts, so pithy quotes like this are his style. But the Gelug school is literally the debate school that practices reductio ad absurdum in the courtyards to suss out what is true. So it's always a little sad to see that and the rest of the philosophy de-emphasized.

All I do in KDE is set it to Breeze Dark, set my taskbar to dock + autohide, and change media keybinds. There's tons of options but you don't really have to touch any of them. Default is fine.

I don't think you're being a dick. I've worked with college students extensively and the reality is that many of them don't actually want to be there or think they can skate by without really putting work in. Some of those people probably had legitimate excuses, but many people just prioritize other things or don't quite yet have the habits or emotional discipline they need. And that's fine but they're not the ones to be catered to or else professors lose all compassion and refuse to give any leniency because they've been played by the late submission gamers too many times.

Use something like Vesktop or Goofcord. They're wrappers for the web version with extra features and telemetry blocked/removed. As private as you're going to get with Discord. They have flatpaks available.

Looking at their emails and other messages to see if those risks were communicated and ignored. Forcing them to produce documents researching and stating their potential impact before they're allowed to undergo certain actions. Using common sense like "dumping garbage in a river is bad".

Is there proof of that other than the forum post referencing the ex-scientologist from another band? I thought the list of names who signed in support of him was public, so would have expected that sort of information to be easy to find.

EDIT: She doesn't appear to have written a letter, which doesn't mean she didn't support him, but I'm not really finding anything that says otherwise or that she's still involved with the church.

We've gotta martyr the first beanis poster as a lesson to all the others. Or else get a personal word filter.

I'm on the stock US ROM because there's no custom ROM available yet. The first one was just booting as of last week. And theres no recovery tool, so if things go wrong, its bricked. You can swap between official region Roms after rooting the phone.

I love the battery life for one. I've used Pixels since the 3 and aside from being able to use GrapheneOS and being smaller, they're junk, especially in that department. I would often come home with my phone at 4% on battery saver while traveling and taking photos, but this thing has lasted me two days before getting to that point. It also doesn't overheat in the slightest, except when fast charging. It has VOOC charging that gets it full up within like 20~ minutes.

The software isn't anything to write home about. Aside from the app drawer and the OnePlus apps, it's pretty close to stock Android. I replaced most of the stock apps with open source ones.

I don't play intensive games, but it has strong FPS throttling if it starts to detect heat to keep things cool, which can affect people who play stuff like Genshin Impact.

I paid $398 after trading in my previous phone and plan to keep this for as long as possible and hopefully put LineageOS on it when its available.

These were cool to look at but then you get in the game and your cute female Hume actually looks like a turtle. The In-game graphics did not match at all. Still a big fan though.

I think I'm probably overly considerate of people around me when it comes to physical space and trying not to inconvenience them, so it generally drives me crazy when people lack self awareness in those kinds of situations. Taking up a whole sidewalk, walking down the middle of the grocery aisle, stopping in a doorway to text someone, etc. It's really not that big of a deal and I just say "excuse me" and they snap back to reality but internally I'm like "MOVE".

Guys with huge backpacks standing in front of the back door of the bus waiting to get off 5 stops from now and inevitably getting in someone's way who needs to get off first when there's plenty of open seats and bars to hold onto away from the door. SIT DOWN